aving made a splash of a debut several years back with The End of Desire, Jill Bialosky's second collection of poems, Subterranean, continues the themes of appetite and suffering through the lens of the recently-popular classical myths of Persephone and Demeter, among others. She moves sadly across the paths to the underworld, setting contemporary models against classical Kimmerian settings, the trend set forcefully in motion at the start of the last century by Ezra Pound and H.D., who may be considered, with some caution, the Homer and Sappho respectively of their day. This trend was re-embedded in the American poetic tradition by Jorie Graham, most recently in Swarm, and Louise Glück, in The Seven Ages. Bialosky's journal-like matching of classical and commonplace surroundings at first jars the imagination. This jarring allows the reader to enter the underworld chambers of memory through which she has chosen to travel in these poems. The tensely-gathered stanzas at first scatter before the eye then become more solidly etched on the page with repeated readings. Her trim metrical designs firmly cast images of squalid winter interiors and grubby streets, cold wind and loneliness, of separation from child and lover, the central elements of the poems. She owes as much to Sharon Olds's The Gold Cell, its descriptions of sexual love and attending furies, as to Anne Sexton's The Awful Rowing Toward God, its orbicular metaphors of anguish approximating religious ecstasy and ultimate despair of abandonment; Bialosky writes: ". . . in the twilight / after the journey / that she knew no one / (perhaps not even the gods) / was watching." Bialosky is certainly at her best when constructing sparse long poems, resembling the airy, fleeing metrical jumps of late Sylvia Plath; one recalls 'Ariel': "Berries cast dark / Hooks— / Black sweet blood mouthfuls, / Shadows. Something else // Hauls me through air— / Thighs, hair; / Flakes from my heels" and understands the brisk motion it shares with Bialosky's 'The Fate of Persephone': "Still in the autumnal // haze, / the berry-berry / shrub, / still young, still vibrant / drops bright, violent / violet berries." Influences such as these, earlier credited by way of epigraphs in The End of Desire, are now fully gathered into the bedrock of Bialosky's new poems. Lines play on the ear like a hurried whisper, desperate yet intimate, rushed only by its own need to rise from dark regions of heart and memory, Plutonian echoes. If a poet writing today finds herself compelled by creative intelligence and what is generously called the muse to write in a confessional vein, this is the way to do it. The poems breathe; they ache; they are opened for just a moment to the sunlight then recede sadly again into the shadows from which they emerged.